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electric fountain
Tuesday, March 9 1999
Yesterday I neglected to mention yet another thing contributing to my overall workplace misery: the repeated failure of one of my robots. ASD is absolutely right about programmers; they lack the gene that prevents normal people from repeatedly banging their heads against brick walls. To be a successful programmer, one must face discouraging, unfixable disappointment with bullheaded determination, trying everything possible until the thing that is broken is fixed. And when everything has been tested and still the thing doesn't work, you have to reassess what it means to have "tested everything." At times a programmer can reach such a serious impasse that he seriously considers abandoning programming forever. But still, for reasons that defy normal explanation, he presses on. He does this even though he doesn't quite remember that there is nothing in this world like the satisfaction of breaking through such an impasse. When it happens, it's like a personal Newtonian Revolution, and there can be several in a typical workday. No wonder I'm addicted.
Complicating my debugging of late has been a mysterious failure of IIS to return the line numbers of errors, so I find myself resorting to a "binary search" (dividing the code into successive halves) until I find the source of my woe. I urge anyone familiar with this behaviour and its solution to write me; no one in my workplace is experiencing this problem and no one knows the solution either.
Today was a much better day. I broke through all my programming impasses and made massive strides ahead. By the end of the day I felt empowered and energetic, not exploited and broken.
I came home to find Kim upset over my latest writing, specifically the fantasies I'd entertained about Ludmilla the Brazilian girl. She'd discussed the matter with her astrologer (whose services she now gets for free) and he'd managed to rile her up even further. To calm her nerves, she'd gone out and bought one of those little indoor fountains powered by an electric motor. I started laughing when I saw it; in its own way it was absolutely adorable. The tinkling of the water doesn't completely drown out the laboured grinding of the motor.
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